


The cautionary tale of Sean Astin

by afra_schatz



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: Crack, Curtain Fic, Established Relationship, Humor, M/M, New Zealand
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-09
Updated: 2012-10-09
Packaged: 2017-11-15 23:41:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/533060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afra_schatz/pseuds/afra_schatz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sean A. gets evacuated from his own house due to the sniffles and needs to board with one crazyass King of Gondor and his foul-mouthed British companion. Craziness ensues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The cautionary tale of Sean Astin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [evocates](https://archiveofourown.org/users/evocates/gifts).



Hello. My name is Sean Astin, but you can also refer to me as ‘the one sane person on the set of this movie’. Or, and personally I think this is the most appropriate, think of me as ‘the cautionary tale of why one should under no circumstances (not even under the danger of death) take up one’s friends’ offer to room with them’. At least not if all your friends are serious nutcases.

As it is, my week of horror, the one that nearly brought my sanity down to its knees, started with my youngest daughter sneezing into her fruit loops. While being unsanitary all on its own, it also posed a larger problem for the Astin household. You see, my wife says that under no circumstances can I get sick while shooting a movie. Before you put this down to protective support: My wife claims that I am (and I quote) an ‘absolute pain in the behind’ when I am have a runny nose, and more than once she has promised to throttle me personally when I ~~complained about~~ off-handedly mentioned a slightly sore throat.

Very soon after the fruit loop sneeze, it was very obvious that my youngest had a serious case of the flu and that I had to be (again, I quote) ‘temporarily evacuated’. However, since Elijah and Billy were currently homeless because they accidentally (or so they claim) set their hotel rooms on fire, and Dom had moved in with what we all agreed was Wellington’s only streetwalker, my only other choices were Orlando, Ian and Viggo. Ian didn’t answer his phone or the doorbell, even though I am almost certain that I saw someone moving behind the curtain. Orlando generously offered me his sofa, but it turned out that he adopted five or more stray cats without telling anyone of us. I nearly died of anaphylactic shock the second I stepped over the threshold. 

This is the reason why I took up temporary residence in the house of the King of Gondor And Its Adjoining Plains Of Madness and the British pet he adopted. I’d like to use this moment to point out that I really had no other choices at this stage of my evacuation.

If you’ve been around our movie set for a while (or really, if you have internet access and follow the fanpages), you’ve probably all heard about Viggo’s overly artistic streak and about Sean’s continued attempts on fellow actors’ lives that he calls ‘pranks’. 

Let me tell you one thing: These stories aren’t true. The truth is much, _much_ worse. 

Personally, I think the day that Viggo suggested to Sean to move in with him has the same historical significance as the day Ren and Stimpy decided to do the ‘Adult Party Cartoon’. At least it is as emotionally damaging to onlookers and/or sort-of-involuntary house guests.

Don’t get me wrong, working with Viggo and Sean on a film is one of the true pleasures in life. They are intense and professional, always on time and perfectly prepared, inhumanly patient and enduring. They are excellent actors, trust me. Too bad that – once PJ called it a wrap for the day – they are both such complete weirdos.

I don’t know if you are all familiar with the concept of courtly love in the middle ages. Basically, it says that a man (per definition an uncivilized brute who yells at the television, farts in public and has no appreciation whatsoever of Christian Values) is tamed through love. His fair maiden makes him jump through enough hoops on the way to her heart to make a perfectly house-trained show-poodle of chivalry of him. You might’ve guessed what the problem with this equation is if one tries to adapt it for Viggo and Sean. Yes, right. No fair maiden in sight anywhere, instead you got not one but two uncivilized boors with no inducement to change whatsoever.

For example, neither of the two apparently knows how to operate a dishwasher or a washing machine, and they both think the kitchen sink has only two purposes: Storing beer cans and rinsing paint brushes. When (for reasons that shouldn’t be surprising after this, but, somehow, are so anyway if you ask Sean and Viggo) there are no more clean plates or clothes, Viggo keeps staring into the empty drawers like he can hypnotize them into magically filling themselves again. Sean takes the less complicated course and simply blows a fuse. Surprisingly, both strategies aren’t successful, so usually by the end of the week Viggo starts re-using the least dirty plates and randomly re-wears dirty clothes (his as well as Sean’s), while Sean exclusively eats take-out food and walks around the house in increasingly worrying states of almost-nudity. 

Among their favorite past times are the usual hobbies you’d expect from an American and a British guy housing together: Yelling abuse at the television while a match of football (of whichever variety) is on, fishing (usually in the miniature pond in the backyard that certainly has no fish in it but beats all other ponds in terms of proximity to the fridge), finding a stupid random game to fixate on and take way too seriously until it naturally escalates into a wrestling match on the living room carpet. This week it was ‘Mouse Trap’, which personally I find more than a little disturbing.

Aside from those fairly normal hobbies, their repertoire also includes the following:

  * create elaborate sculptures on the living room table that are solely made out of shoes (Viggo),
  * sing horribly off-key football songs to already withering pot plants until they are ready to commit suicide (Sean),
  * unhinge all doors in the house in order to experience (and I quote) ‘real freedom ‘(Viggo, of course),
  * replace the door to the study and nail it shut with a pot-smoking Viggo still inside (Sean),
  * shave one’s head and possibly other areas of the body out of sheer boredom (Sean as well),
  * spend an afternoon catching crickets in order to fry them and coat them with chocolate to serve them for dinner (Viggo),
  * knit a woolen hat because for some strange reason one’s head is cold (Sean),
  * have loud and noisy sex in the middle of the night, possibly only so one’s house guest who has a really early call doesn’t get any sleep at all (Sean and Viggo).



Yes, I know there are two points on that list that might need a little elaboration.

First of all, imagine how utterly and completely bewildered I was when I found out that Sean Bean, man’s man and self-proclaimed ‘bit of rough’, is able to knit. With several colored yarns and seriously intimidating complicated patterns. He even made me a pair of socks (because the tiles in their kitchen are really cold in the morning), and I know from my wife how difficult socks are. Uncanny.

Secondly – I knew you would ask – the sex. Again, if you have internet access and follow the fanpages (don’t you have any real hobbies?), you might have read something about the whole male bonding experience that is the ‘Rings’ filming and suspected that this includes some bonding without clothes as well. Generally speaking, you are completely wrong. 

Billy and Dom for example are far too busy being clinically insane to have sex, least of all with one another. Elijah is clearly too young, and that is the least we speak of that. Orlando (who is, of course hopelessly in love with Liv) may have tremendous success luring homeless cats into his house, but since his way of wooing Liv consists of acts like sending her elf ears in the mail (that guy worries me sometimes), I am pretty sure he has not yet succeeded in bedding her. 

Sean and Viggo, however, have been boinking each other since the day that Viggo arrived on set. He introduced himself to Sean by saying, ‘You may kneel if you wish, I am Aragorn, your rightful king and ruler’ to which Sean replied, ‘Yeah, whatever. I have the bigger cock’. After this quite singular example of romance and wooing, they have been inseparable.

That’s not saying that there isn’t still wooing going on anyway. 

If you think that being an unwilling audience to nightly orgies puts you in a slightly uncomfortable spot, I’d like to see your face when you walk into the kitchen one morning and find a giant cake the shape of a penis on the counter. With pink icing and the words ‘Who’s got the bigger dick now?’ in surprisingly neat handwriting (Viggo’s). Sean usually reciprocated any of Viggo’s slightly over the top gestures by quoting Chaucer at him, preferably the juicier bits, and by getting him flowers. There was a huge amount of truly exceptional bouquets all over the house, and Viggo’s choice in oil paint shades was clearly influenced by the color of Sean’s favorite flowers of the day.

None of that was really new to me because Viggo’s and Sean’s ideas of PDA have always bordered the grotesque. What was new, were all the little things. Viggo sneaked out before dawn because Sean had off-handedly mentioned wanting croissants for breakfast. Sean gripped Viggo’s hand wordlessly when the heli was about to take off, and when Viggo was about to nod off while we were watching a movie, he would do the same. Sean (who bitched about once more being out-voted by Viggo and I and forced to ‘watch some arty French crap again’) sat completely still throughout the entire film to not wake him. After a fifteen hour shoot, Sean ran Viggo a bath and sat on the floor with his back against the tub, reading a newspaper, to make sure Viggo didn’t fall asleep and drown himself.

I liked to think that the first three days of my staying there it was my calming influence that caused them to woo one another like fairly normal people. I made the mistake of pointing that out to them on the morning of the fourth day when we were waiting to get picked up for more hill-top filming. Both Sean and Viggo looked at me like I had grown real hobbit feet, and that was when I realized that they had actively been trying to tone it down for my benefit. I also realized (from the mad glint in Viggo’s eyes and the way Sean immediately started fondling Viggo’s bottom right there on the front porch) that they wouldn’t bother anymore.

So, you could say that it was all my fault. Hubris is an unforgiving bitch. Especially when you are forced to live in the den of two middle-aged men who could co-star in a Spiderman spin-off, only instead of the infamous accident in a lab filled with radioactive material as the location, you have Viagra Headquarters. And may I remind you that someone (Viggo) made sure that there were no doors and hence no privacy at all?

Also, I did mention already that I had the suspicion that the later the hour the louder the frolicking? I might add that this also included quite detailed descriptions of who was doing what to whom, including detailed feedback (with the words ‘Christ, ‘baby’, and ‘harder’ most prominently featured, and I have yet to decide which of the three I find most baffling). You would think that certain things are rather self-explanatory. Which body part interlocks with what is not necessarily something that needs pointing out, does it?

Now, I won’t bore you with the details as I am sure you are far more interested with my emotional state than descriptions of Viggo’s and Sean’s sexual endeavors. Let us just say that over the course of the next days I learned to announce myself – first I tried a polite cough before I entered the room but since that didn’t work out so well, I then proceeded to yelling ‘I am coming in, please don’t be naked and on top of each other’. I also stopped eating food directly from the kitchen counter, the dining table and the living room bar for sanitary reasons.

Don’t let my emotional scarring fool you, however. Sean and Viggo were always very hospitable. They shared their take-out, let me have a vote during movie night and I am pretty certain that they didn’t use the guest bed I was sleeping in for any of their sexual experiments, at least not for the time I was sleeping in it. 

Also, and I thought that truly heartwarming, they threw me a party when I announced that the sniffles in the Astin household were dealt with, the kids were out of quarantine, and I could safely move back in. And if there is one thing (aside from public sex, fearsome pranks and knitting) that Sean and Viggo are absolute experts, it’s throwing a party.

I kind of lost track of what was happening after Sean shoved British beer brand no 8 into my hand (there was a tasting contest of some sort going on). But I am pretty sure that one of the last things I remember is Harry and Karl showing up in the backyard. My temporary memory loss might have something to do with them, since they are always at least partially stoned when I meet them, and they are very generous with there weed. I also _think_ there was a wet t-shirt contest later, and I might be mistaken, but it could be that at one point of the evening Orlando used me as his magic seahorse in his battle for dominance of the pool against Dom.

In any case, on the next morning, I woke up in pink swimming trunks that I am pretty certain belonged to Liv. Elijah was using me as his mattress while I was lying on the kitchen floor, every one else who hadn’t made it home was still in a sort of coma. I got dressed, found my suitcase, and with one eye closed as a precaution, I peeked around the corner into Sean’s and Viggo’s bedroom (nope, still no door in case you wondered) to say goodbye. I didn’t catch them in the act for once but peacefully sleeping. Viggo was lying on his back and snoring open-mouthed and peacefully, and Sean lay on his stomach, his arm possessively slung over Viggo’s chest, with a pillow draped over his head.

I didn’t wake them or any of the others but just sneaked out of the house, thankful for such a great send-off. But it seems, taking midnight swims in the pool and camping out on the kitchen floor isn’t too good for one’s health. I had barely set foot into my house when the first sneeze hit me like a freight train. My wife sighed ostentatiously, and my youngest daughter eyed me skeptically and told me to better not sneeze into her fruit loops or else.

I am sure once I regain full access to the memory of that last night, I will find a way to blame this on the rightful heir to the kingdom of Gondor and his well-hung and foul-mouthed steward.

The End

**Author's Note:**

> This is for who wrote the loveliest Orlibean for me and whom I owed fic for a LONG time. Her prompt was “Five times Sean was embarrassed to be seen with Viggo”. This is Astin pov which means I cheated :). Also, this was written in something like three hours in the middle of the night, so I am not responsible for anything. – I suppose this can be read as a sequel to [‘Please enjoy responsibly‘](http://afra-schatz.livejournal.com/228823.html).


End file.
